Hillary borrows from Lenin’s playbook

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is not quitting the presidential election, and has one more primary victory to add to her total: Pennsylvania, which she won on Tuesday.

Once the star of the almost 800 superdelegates, Clinton’s hold over them may be diminishing as she can’t win convincingly enough to erase the lead of her rival, Sen. Barack Obama (Note: She still leads Obama in superdelegates who have declared their support, 259 to 236). But as calls mount for her departure, she doesn’t seem to be listening.

It was once said of Vladimir Lenin that he won debates by refusing to stop speaking until everyone, exhausted, conceded the argument. “Lenin scarcely noticed his defeat,” Robert K. Massie wrote in Nicholas and Alexandra. “A brilliant dialectician, prepared to argue all night, he gained ascendancy over his Bolshevik colleagues by sheer force of intellect and physical stamina.” Will Clinton’s similar steadfastness outlast Obama’s audacity?